11 Powerful Secrets to get the most of your Search Ads

Digital Disruptors

Marketers need to keep optimizing their search ads for max results. Since we’ve observed a lot of UAE-targeted search ads falling behind these simple best practices, here are 11 tips to take things to the next level.

Why is it necessary to enhance your Search Ads?

• Improve your Click-Through Rate (CTR)
• Increase Quality Score (for higher Ad Raking)
• Lower your Cost per Click / Cost Per Action

There's two ways how search marketers can go about this:

• Enhance campaign infrastructure. In this session, we focus more on ‘text ads’.
• Optimize your campaign towards ROI, setup conversion tracking (we will be covering this soon)

With regards to text Ads, we recommend you to focus on using Ad Extensions along with additional best practices which we have picked up over the years.

Ad extensions

Ad extensions help by occupying more room within the search engine results page. Who wouldn't be excited if they were offered free additional real estate? Here are a few selected ad extensions for first timers to bank upon:

1. Location Extension

Let’s you add a piece of your businesses address with directions. We expect location extensions to appear when a local-info-seeking search phrase is used. i.e. best lasagna around JBR.

2. Call Extension

Ads a Click-to-call functionality on the mobile display. i.e. have your number displayed in a “clickable” format so a searcher can quickly connect with your business.

Tip: Combine location & call extension within an ad group. Imagine someone searches for lunch buffet in Dubai Media City and notices your restaurant address to be pretty close by (from the location extension configured to appear in the search results), and then sees a call button right next to it. He could call your restaurant immediately and reserve a table.

Why are these two extensions important?

• Because the volume of searches on mobile is much higher in the UAE.
• Mobile searches are usually connected to a user's intent to act immediately i.e. Inquire or order your product or service

3. Sitelinks

Instead of having a user land upon your first landing page and then find out that he has to click elsewhere to know more about something more specific, Sitelinks allows you to showcase additional links to pages which are connected with your offering. For example: If your healthcare client is running an anniversary campaign to offer free checkups, and you've got a main landing page connected to sub-pages that mention details about diabetes, blood pressure, weight loss etc. Your main text ad could mention about the camp, below which you can add sitelinks to directly access the diabetes, BP or weight loss sections

4. Callout extension

Use callout's to mention your business’ USP's or Direct Response phrases. Examples: Free delivery, Limited edition, Few seats left , Scholarships available.

5. Structured snippet extensions

Decide what type of information potential customers will find most valuable when considering your products and services (i.e. if you are a university, then course names. And if you are an automobile brand, then the model names). You can then add specific, supporting details to create a supporting line of text that looks like - Brands: Sportage, Optima, Rio, Sorento, Cadenza We continue with a few tips to boost your text ads: 6. Use ' Keyword insertion' ad customizer to make your ads dynamic.

7. Include your most important message in the headline. Example: Hyundai DSF Offer - Extended to 31st April

8. Utilize your display URLs. Advertisers can now optionally add up to 2 fifteen-character path fields to append to their display URL. Although your final URL might be Hyundai-uae.com/DSFOffer, you can now put it as Hyundai-uae.com/DSFOffers/2017Models

9. Impeccable wordplay. Use Call To Actions such as Get started, Reserve now, Get a quote, Coach me... for spontaneous results. Pay attention to your competitors advertising so you can out-do their wordplay

10. Indicate urgency. Use the Adwords ‘countdown’ function. Adwords presents unique enhancements known ad customizers. You can research more about it.

11. Use permitted symbols such as Asterix (5* Facilities), Numbers with Slash (24/7), Registered trademark or the copyright symbol (®™ ©), Ampersand (&), Exclamation mark (!), Percentage symbol (50% off) etc. What next? Get-started and let us know how things work out for you.